Posts from 30 November 2014

Today was our first exposure to Real Rails™. We delved into ActiveRecord and creating relations between our created classes and their associated tables (created via migrations).

Setup is pretty straightforward: specify your database during creation, or edit the .yml file to specify your database because you're dumb and forgot to throw rails the configuration option, then get to writing migrations. It's clear that rails is designed around a fast iteration cycle, either Agile or TDD, because just about every action has an easy way to build up, reload, or rollback.

But that's not really what today was about. Today was about trudging though a lot of examples of the most basic Rails structures, which are superficially similar to their SQL roots and the code that's created when you create raw SQL glued together with Ruby. It's certainly nice, and we learned a lot about the basics of Rails, but it felt kind of like a slog because it never went much of anywhere… yet.

So this weekend, I'm going to try to re-read Hartl's tutorial alongside the pre-readings for next week to try to build some excitement for what Rails can do. I know it's powerful, but I don't feel it yet.